Published 4:00 am, Saturday, October 30, 2004

2004-10-30 04:00:00 PDT Ramallah, West Bank -- Like a scene from some post-apocalyptic TV movie, they sat for long hours in rooms with one wall missing, in a building three stories high next to the office of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

There were about 20 of them, sipping tea, cleaning their AK-47s or snoozing quietly in the sun that drenched the rooms through the missing exterior wall. These were the wanted men of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, sought by Israel on suspicion of being involved in countless attacks on Israelis and the lynchings of suspected Palestinian collaborators.

The building where they passed their days had housed one of Arafat's intelligence services until its outer wall was ripped away during Israel's invasion of Arafat's compound in April 2002.

Officially, these men did not exist. Passers-by could see them, and they would sometimes wave back, but journalists were forbidden by gun-toting guards to photograph or talk to them. Their ghostly presence in Arafat's bomb-damaged compound in Ramallah was repeatedly denied by the Palestinian leader's spokesmen.

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Some of them were officially employed by one of Arafat's myriad security forces. In their spare time, which recently has been plentiful, they doubled as "activists" for the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the terrorist wing of Arafat's Fatah group. Usually their victims were Israelis, sometimes other Palestinians. Occasionally, they provided muscle for security or political heavies. Then they returned to their three-walled rooms.

The first Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, quit his post the day after the ghosts were unleashed against him.

Abbas had repeatedly demanded the gunmen be expelled from the compound, but Arafat refused. In September 2003, as Abbas arrived to address the Palestinian Legislative Council across town, about a dozen of them, masked and wearing military fatigues, went to the council building and spray-painted its walls with graffiti accusing the prime minister of being a traitor and in the pocket of the CIA.

In 2002, a monthlong Israeli siege of Arafat's compound was lifted only after the Palestinian leader agreed to transfer four wanted men from his compound to a jail in Jericho.

One was accused by Israeli of organizing a huge shipment of heavy weaponry in the Karine A, a ship that Israeli commandos captured in the Red Sea in late 2001. Three others were accused of involvement in the assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi in October 2001. Arafat initially denied that any of the men were there.

The next day, Abbas resigned, blaming Arafat for undermining attempts at reform.

Many of them did leave for a few days last April, when Israel threatened to invade the compound again and grab them, but slowly they drifted back when nothing came of the threat.

On Thursday, close to midnight, the ghosts finally vanished, exorcised by the imminent departure of their patron and protector for medical treatment in Paris. They walked out through the front gate, carrying their weapons, and vanished into the night.